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Disruption in the education industry

Well ETS is starting to see quite a few disruptions in the education market. We're starting to see the proliferation of technologies, the bring-your-own devices into the classrooms. We're starting to see that technologies such as voice translation could eliminate the need for English language testing, in the future. We're seeing disruptions to the way big data could be used as a way to do assessment. If you could gather enough data on a person's behaviour, if they left behind a digital ocean of information, you could mine that information and you could understand their skills, their weaknesses, their strengths, and you could help them to know where they fit in the optimised world. So in the past, we used large scale assessment to do that because the data was lacking, but now, with everyone leaving behind a digital trail that could dramatically change the way assessment is done in the future. Where we really want to get to is to create assessments that help people learn, at the moment they're learning. So that they're getting constant feedback, like you do in a video game, as you play the game it's constantly telling you how well you're doing, and if you do better, you get rewarded, and you move on to a more difficult level. The scaffolding of that experience. That applies to education. ETS in fact work with electronic arts in the glass lab, to create a new game for Sim City, called The Pollution Challenge, which has embedded assessment, students don't even know it. It's the concept of stealth assessment, we hide the assessment in the experience, and we give constant feedback, were gathering all the data that's also used for the teachers to also know how well the students are doing. At the same time, we help the student to continue to advance.

Disruption in the education industry

Well ETS is starting to see quite a few disruptions in the education market. We're starting to see the proliferation of technologies, the bring-your-own devices into the classrooms. We're starting to see that technologies such as voice translation could eliminate the need for English language testing, in the future. We're seeing disruptions to the way big data could be used as a way to do assessment. If you could gather enough data on a person's behaviour, if they left behind a digital ocean of information, you could mine that information and you could understand their skills, their weaknesses, their strengths, and you could help them to know where they fit in the optimised world. So in the past, we used large scale assessment to do that because the data was lacking, but now, with everyone leaving behind a digital trail that could dramatically change the way assessment is done in the future. Where we really want to get to is to create assessments that help people learn, at the moment they're learning. So that they're getting constant feedback, like you do in a video game, as you play the game it's constantly telling you how well you're doing, and if you do better, you get rewarded, and you move on to a more difficult level. The scaffolding of that experience. That applies to education. ETS in fact work with electronic arts in the glass lab, to create a new game for Sim City, called The Pollution Challenge, which has embedded assessment, students don't even know it. It's the concept of stealth assessment, we hide the assessment in the experience, and we give constant feedback, were gathering all the data that's also used for the teachers to also know how well the students are doing. At the same time, we help the student to continue to advance.

Beware. The future’s here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet

One of my favourite quotes is from a science fiction author that the future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet. And one of the tricks that Andy and I used in writing our book, The Second Machine Age, was to go and look at some of the places where the technology is having some of the biggest impacts. And naturally you see them in some of the high tech companies in Silicon Valley, around the Boston area, other leading companies all over the world. But it's not just high tech that's being affected. Ultimately, every industry is having digital technologies at its core. You see that in finance, in banking. You see it in manufacturing, you see it in retailing, you see it in media, in music of course, and each of those industries, as they before more digitised, they have more of these winner-take-all economics, they have more of this bounty, of being able to replicate new processes or ideas very very cheaply. Ultimately, they look more and more like the high tech companies that we've been focusing on.What we're seeing is that not only are individual workers being disrupted, but companies and industries are being disrupted as well. One of the phenomena that we looked at was what we call the rise of micro multi-nationals, the fact that a small group of people, by leveraging digital infrastructure including the cloud, advanced software, big data, can have an impact on millions of people, all over the world. Think of Instagram, or WhatsApp, these are companies with a dozen or a few dozen employees that affected millions of people, hundreds of millions of people with the products they developed. They ultimately were sold for billions of dollars, that was something you wouldn't have seen ten, fifteen years ago. Kodak employed 145,000 people at its peak, a big chunk of the city of Rochester were their suppliers, and other people helping out, with the basic functions of Kodak. So we've seen a sea-change in terms of the ability of a small group of people to leverage technology to disrupt entire industries. And I think a lot of the big companies are realising that they are vulnerable to that kind of disruption because of the power that technology puts in the hands of very small groups of people.

Digital disruption coming to every industry

We're at the dawn of a second machine age, which is augmenting our brains, our mental capacity. We think that the effects of the second machine age will be at least as big as those of the industrial revolution.
The steam engine was an amazing breakthrough. We did some research, we found that it doubled in power about every 70 years. Four times as much efficiency in 140 years. We all know that Moore's Law is a lot faster than that, computer power doubles about every 18 to 24 months, and digitisation is becoming much more pervasive.
In the past decade we've seen some just remarkable breakthroughs, from self-driving cars, to telephones you can talk to and they'll carry out your instructions, basic instructions, we have machines that will write news stories and sports stories, diagnose cancer, and in some cases, better than human doctors. It's just been amazing. But these are not the crowning achievements of the second machine age. These are just the warm-up acts. These are just the early stages of an even bigger revolution that we have ahead of us.
So we hear from some of the executives, boards of directors, that their industry's different, that it can never be vulnerable to digitisation, that's what the folks at Kodak undoubtedly thought, in fact they developed some of the first digital photography equipment it turns out. But they decided that it just wasn't that important, and they didn't want to cannibalise their existing business. Well they went bankrupt the same year that Instagram was sold for a billion dollars. Instagram, a company with a dozen employees.
I don't think there's any industry that's not vulnerable.

Disruptive technologies in the energy industry

I have got to say that one of the biggest disruptions I think right now, we have a process called game changer process where we look for technologies, group technologies that really are just emerging and are having an effect which could apply and effect for the company and one of those is an imaging technology. So we are looking at a variety of imaging technologies all the way from hyperspectral or multispectral for remote scanning. Satellite systems are becoming much more adept to that. We are also using and I think multispectral and hyperspectral for being able to spot gas in various areas but there are a variety of imaging techniques, be they thermal or hyperspectral, multispectral or satellites or mounting them on UAV’s looking at it very broadly but this kind of sensing is becoming quite impactful. That is one area that we are looking at and I think another leading area that came up a lot in the conference today which I was happy to see was robotics. We used to have a joke that whenever we were running out of ideas about what new areas to look into and really press, somebody would always say ‘well there is always robotics’ and it never was really time and I think we are poised now where there could be some great impacts on remote operations and autonomous operations, those kind of things. The other thing I see, I am kind of running on here a little bit but, digitisation of the enterprise, sometimes we use the word automation which is not a good word for it, but I think the digitisation of everything is really upon us and we have grasped that in our grappling with our ‘how do we order our priorities to try to do that?’ I think that operations from one end to the other frankly. So that is very ambitious undertaking for us right now in the whole digitisation frame.

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